Ghost stories from Canada

The Crimson Groom

My first memory is of the day we moved into the Hollis House. I was six, clutching my mother’s hand as she unlocked the heavy oak door. The house was...

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The Cartographer of Still Air

My first memory of the farmhouse is the smell of rust and dried hay, a scent that clung to the walls like a second skin. We moved from the coast...

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The Hollow Chime of the Rusty Bell

My name is Elara, and I’ve spent most of my nineteen years convinced that the dead don’t rest quietly. Since I was a child, I’ve felt a pull toward places...

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The Red-Lined Door

The house on Mistik Creek Road wasn’t just old; it was hollowed out by time. My grandparents had bought it from the township decades ago, when the school board built...

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The Color of Her Eyes

Three weeks ago, I was at my friend Maya’s apartment in the city, killing time before our movie started. Maya had insisted on seeing some independent horror film at the...

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The Calculator in the Drawer

It was a humid Tuesday afternoon in São Paulo when Marina, a student, received a call on her mobile while at home alone. The caller ID showed an unknown landline...

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The Unlit Stairwell

I was sixteen when we moved to the old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road, a place my mother inherited from a cousin she barely mentioned. The house sat at the...

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The Blue-Hooded Visitor

My name is Laura, and I’ve had a few encounters with the other side that I can’t explain away. The first time happened in the autumn of 2018, when my...

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The Signal of the Twelfth Bell

The first time I saw it, I was nine, in the old farmhouse my parents rented that summer. The house had a peculiar feature: a massive grandfather clock in the...

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The Flicker in the Hall

I was nine when we left the endless white of Pond Inlet for the cramped, utilitarian streets of Iqaluit. The move was a blur of cardboard boxes and my mother’s...

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The Candle That Wouldn’t Die

My obsession with the unseen began not with ghost stories told around a summer campfire, but with a battered box of wooden planks and a porcelain planchette that my aunt...

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The Painted Rope

The old farmhouse outside of Lubbock, Texas, had a peculiar history. My family had moved there in the autumn of 1985, when I was six, after my father inherited it...

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The Empty Room

I never thought I’d be the one to stay. When my mom moved out west and my siblings had their own crowded chaos, the old farmhouse on the edge of...

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The Last Ferry

The first time I saw the shoreline of Grey Harbor, the fog was rolling in like a slow tide of gauze. My grandmother had left me her ramshackle cottage at...

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The Porcelain Garden

My earliest memory is of my grandmother’s greenhouse, a place of humid air and the scent of damp earth. She was a botanist, and her world was a symphony of...

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The Hallway of Faint Static

The summer I turned seven, my parents sent me to stay with my grandmother in her old farmhouse on the edge of the salt flats. I remember the smell of...

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The Clear Day

I hadn’t set foot on the trail since the accident. It wasn’t the mountain’s fault, or the lake’s, but my sister’s death had wrapped every familiar landmark in a shroud...

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The Fifth Step Down

My name is Mara, twenty-two, and I’d been living with my fiancé, Leo, and his family in their old farmhouse outside of Stillwater, Minnesota. The house had been in his...

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The Fallen Cross

The first thing I noticed about the house on Hemlock Lane was the smell—old wood, damp plaster, and something faintly mineral, like wet stone. We’d moved there just after our...

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The Glow of Room 12

I never believed in ghosts, not until I took the night shift at the Saltmarsh Motor Lodge. It wasn’t the kind of place you’d find on a postcard; it was...

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